Thursday, June 28, 2012

Hugh Ross (not to be confused with Marcus Ross) is an
astrophysicist and creationist Christian apologist. According to reliable
sources he is Canadian-born, but at least he lives in California and is thus
qualified for inclusion in our encyclopedia. He is president of “Reasons to
Believe” (that’s Fuz Rana’s home organization as well) and may be related to
the vice president of that organization, one Kathy Ross.

Hugh Ross has a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics, and
appears to know what he is talking about – to his credit he has avidly
criticized young earth creationists such as Russell Humphreys for their utterly delusional, ad hoc approaches to the distant starlightproblem.
On the other hand, his own theologically inspired ramblings aren’t quite
founded on science either.

His attempts to reconcile an old universe with a literal interpretation
of Genesis itself engenders some ad hoc hypotheses (the Flood was local,
day-age, and so on). Young earth creationist critics of course latches on to
that like fleas, failing to realize that ad hoc hypotheses concerning religious
beliefs are – for obvious reasons – more easily sustained than scientific ones.

Ross has even granted that Intelligent Design per today is
not a scientific hypothesis and should not be taught in schools.
Luckily, he does have his own “testable” version at hand.
His view of testability is peculiar, by the way: He claims that “UFO's come
from the Devil”, and points out that it can be tested as follows: “according to
the Bible” demons only attack people who dip into the occult and make
themsleves vulnerable. Hence, “[a]ll that is necessary to further prove the
conclusions of demonic involvement […] is to continue surveying people to
ascertain who has encounters with residual UFO's and who does not. If the
demonic idenficiation of the RUFO phenomenon is correct, researchers should
continue to observe a correlation between the degree of invitations in a
person's life to demonic attacks (for example, participation in seances, Uija
games, astrology, spiritualism, witchcraft, palm reading, and psychicreading)
and the proximity of their residual UFO encounters.” (more here).
If you fail to see the problems here, you don’t know enough about scientific
methodology.

Ross, however, thinks there are reasons to wonder why
scientists won’t test his hypothesis. Oh, of course we know: “One reason why
research scientists and others may be reluctant to say that demons exist behind
residual UFO's is because such an answer points too directly to a Christian
interpretation of the problem.” Since scientists are atheists, they wouldn’t
want to do that, would they? Seems that Ross has borrowed the UFO idea from Norm
Geisler; our old friend Gary Bates also has something to say.

Ross claims that evolution is impossible in anything but
bacteria. So how does Ross explain the transitional fossils for large animals?
“God loves horses and whales. He knows because of their huge size and small
populations that they will go extinct rapidly. When they do, he makes new ones.”
That, apparently, is the testable hypothesis supposed to replace evolution. At
least Martin Gaskell is a fan.

Diagnosis: The fact that Ross, by comparison to most young
earth creationists, comes across as eminently reasonable should not be allowed
to obscure the fact that he is a loon. It just tells you more about the
profundity of young earth lunacy.

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Robertson is a
founding member of the Taliban satellite known as the 700 Club, a Christian
ultra-extremist terrorist group funded by TV telethons. When people call in,
Robertson will cure them for whatever illness they may have by hollering his
ever-faithful servant, God,
and make Him perform the trick – or to smite down people Robertson doesn’t
particularly fancy. Robertson views himself as God’s personal messenger on
earth (read that as “Pat da boss, Jesus his muscle man”), and claims to have
direct contact with the prophets (yes, those prophets). This is a source of
information Robertson uses to predictdisasters that will happen to people who don’t behave the way Robertson thinks God ought
to want people to behave.
He often makes his predictions after a disaster has already struck, but there
are the annual exceptions (we are still waiting for Orlando to be destroyed by a meteor). In
fact, Robertson strikes one as a slightly eccentric, utterly delusional and
repugnantly evil version of the wizard Tim: “Hurricane, In the name of Jesus I
take authority over you and command you to change course. In the name of Jesus
I command you to turn away from Virginia Beach now. You will turn south and
then east and strike the wicked godless heathen land of Cuba instead. Amen.”
Chants Pat. He also prophesied the end of times to happen in 1980, 1982, 1985,
1996 and 2007. His 2012 predictions are here (he also has first-hand testimonial from Jesus that Obama will disintegrate
America,
the only remedy being prayer and sending Robertson money).

For example, 9/11 is
really the responsibility of the ACLU and abortionists, and the Haiti
earthquake can obviously be blamed on the Haitians’s old pact with the devil.
In fact, Robertson is a full-scale conspiracy theorist; his claim that Obama is
directly behind the Occupy Wall Street protests is just one example among many. In 1982
he published a book called “The New World Order” which dealt with, you know,
the new world order,
and relied heavily on the writings of certified madman Eustace Mullins as well as (allegedly – though Cumbey is not an entirely trustworthy source)
plagiarizing Constance Cumbey.
Robertson’s expertise on matters meteorological and geological is described
here.

Robertson, whose
views tend toward the anti-semitic,
also claimed that Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke because of his ungodly
leniency toward the Palestinians. That did not go down particularly well with
the Israeli government,
but then, despite his support of Israel, he doesn’t think much of Judaism and
does claim that all Jews must convert to Christianity – in order to not prevent
but usher in the end times.
Robertson has also claimed that feminism leads to witchcraft, infanticide and
gay socialism,
and that “Many of those people involved in Adolph Hitler were Satanists. Many
of them were homosexuals. The two things seem to go together,” though he didn’t
provide any sources for the claim. You can find more anti-gay quotes here. A novel one is: “[Gays] want to come into churches and disrupt church
services and throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the
face of ministers.” And there is, of course, this one.

Robertson, not being
satisfied with his role as a fire and brimstone prophet, faith healer, Televangelical and media mogul (he also founded the Christian Broadcasting Network,
which is currently run by his son Gordon),
is also a dietary and healthcare advisor and lifestyle consultant
– he is famous for bragging about how he leg-pressed 2000 pounds,
all because of his wonderful special protein shake.

But really,
Robertson is without doubt one of the most repugnantly evil people alive.
For example - The 700 Club runs the charity called Operation Blessing. Operation
Blessing is advertised as helping people in need in 3rd world countries. That,
however, is just for telethon purposes. In reality, Operation Blessing is a
front for Robertson's multifarious crimes against humanity in Africa. In the
1990s, for instance, Operation Blessing used money collected to help refugees
in Rwanda to finance planes transporting diamond-mining equipment for the
Robertson-owned African Development Corporation, a venture Robertson had
established in cooperation with Zaire's then-dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. Seko
was an old friend of Robertson’s – as was Liberia’s dictator Charles Taylor,
whom Robertson tried to help by swaying the American government because Robertson owns a gold mine in Liberia. Robertson also supported Gbagbo,
by the way, presumably because he was of the right religion.
Although he hasn’t explicitly hearted Anders Breivik, this comes dangerously close.

Robertson’s general
level of insanity
can be discerned from this selection of quotes. For instance: “Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America
is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same
thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the
liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians.
Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any
group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in
history.” No, Mr. Robertson, I don’t think you are entirely accurate here, and
I don’t Christians count as a “minority” in the US. But then, Robertson is
legendary when it comes to failed analogies.
And failed reasoning.

And his views on
evolution? “I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover:
If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected him
from your city.”

There’s another
(slightly overlapping) list of quotes here.
And there’s of course this one.
In fact, Robertson has said rather a lot of stupid things.
To reach something close to the bottom, you can read about him interviewing
James Inhofehere.
Or watch his reaction to the fact that America is taking steps to prevent gay
people from getting killed around the world.

In the previous post we lamented the demise of several
prominent and insane conspiracy theories. Well, the present religious wingnut,
creationist and global warming denialist, is really worthy of Zechariah Sitchin
himself, even though his lunacy stays within more socially accepted bounds. Jay
Richards has a Ph.D in philosophy and theology from Princeton
Theological Seminary and is a Discovery Institute Fellow. He has written many
books about science, which he does not understand. He has done no scientific
research.

With Guillermo Gonzales he wrote “The Privileged Planet: How
Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery” (“the little that is new in this book isn't interesting, and what is old is
just old-hat creationism in a new, modern-looking astronomical costume” –
William Jeffreys, a real astronomer).
Richards has also written “Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the
Solution and Not the Problem,” so of course global warming has to be a
conspiracy; if it weren’t the terrain would cause problems for his map. The
latter seems to be his main obsession these days, but he sometimes breaks loose
to argue that Intelligent Design creationism is “good theology”.
We have independent reason to think AGW is a lie, and we have independent
reason to think evolution is a lie. This shows that there is a conspiracy to
brainwash us, and is further evidence that both theories are lies (besides,
scientific consensus = conspiracy).
Thus goes Richards.
It doesn’t strike him that there may be a simpler explanation for the data.

Diagnosis: Idiot with capital “D” and standard denialist:
“since X would really be a problem for my presuppositions, X has to be false”
is not a good methodological rule for determining facts.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

The last few years have seen many mad conspiracy theorists
taking down their signposts (Sitchin, Pabst, Carr, Ferguson, Kaysing, Mullins
and others), and our planned next entry Ralph Rene joined them in 2008. I have no idea whether Susan Joy Rennison is American (she
“has an honors degree in physics and geophysics from a British university” (not
named), and is an independent researcher and author of “Tuning the Diamonds -
Electromagnetism & Spiritual Evolution”); her website is here (see
also this),
but she appears to be European (and mad as a hatter).

Well, there’s always more where they came from. Jeff Rense
is your Pabst-worthy conspiracy theorist, and he combines it with alternative
medicine peddling of Gary Null-like levels of lack of touch with reality. He
runs the website Rense.com,
which competes with whale.to for crankery, and he has his own show on satellite radio.

Friday, June 15, 2012

George Rekers is an instance of Haggard’s law. In 2010 this former Southern Baptist minister was caught at the Miami International Airport with a young man hired “to carry his bags” from Rentboys.com (turns out there were other incidents as well). Nothing wrong with that, of course, except that Rekers was an associate of James Dobson and associated with the Family Research Council. Rekers has in fact written several books about the dangers, evil and sinfulness of homosexuality, like this one. (Maybe he was just doing research?) Notice that he is included in the Encyclopedia because of that. Hypocrisy is not enough (though Rekers, a staunch opposer of gay adoption, has himself an adopted son).

Diagnosis: Hilarity concerning the situation should not let us overlook the fact that Rekers is an appallingly repugnant human being.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

The Coalition for SafeMinds (Sensible Action For Ending
Mercury-Induced Neurological Disorders) is a non-profit organization “dedicated
to investigating the risks of exposure to mercury from medical products” – or
more accurately an organization devoted to claiming that mercury in vaccines
(thimerosal)
causes autism and other neurological disorders, regardless of the fact that the claim is false and the connection thoroughly
refuted by science (“conspiracy” shouts the SafeMinders, as expected).
SafeMinds, like all crackpot organizations (indeed, this is a very characteristic
trait of crackpot orginazitions, from the creationist ones to global warming
deniers), has continued to pursue the issue in the political and judicial
arenas, and has also attempted to sway the public. But they are, of course, not doing actual scientific investigations, which, as any rational person who cares about truth and accuracy knows, is what would actually,
you know, settle the issue. More here.

Lyn Redwood is the president and co-founder of SafeMinds,
and a nurse. Her son is diagnosed with PDD-NOS, and no one doubts that Redwood
actually sincerely cares. She is not evil (except in the sense of Grey’s law).
But she is thoroughly misguided by confirmation bias and her failure to understand science, and she has e.g. testified before the
United States House of Representatives Government Reform Committee as such (no,
no science, just the ‘better be safe than sorry’ gambit – which hardly works in
the case of life-saving vaccines). She has taken her work abroad as well.

Other prominent members of SafeMinds include its executive
director and co-founder Sallie Bernard (one of their most devout conspiracy theorists and a member of the panel that
issued a 2007 federally-funded study that found no link between thimerosal
exposure and neurological problems, although Bernard did not agree with the
findings – showing decisively that the conclusion is already given and no
amount of evidence could change that),
and lobbyist and co-founder Elizabeth “Liz” Birt.

As with other antivaxxers and woo-peddlers, Redwood and
SafeMinds are fond of the Big Pharmashill gambit.
They like to point out to policy makers that researchers have conflicts of
interest – failing to recognize that the fact that they themselves are involved
in lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies may count as a conflict of
interest as well.

But then, what need is evidence or reason when you have a
good ad hominem attack?

Diagnosis: A significant detrimental force in modern
civilization, SafeMinds is a typically vigorous, ardent crackpot organization
that has no interest in truth and reality if it does not support dogma – and
fails to realize that this is exactly what their governing idea is. Extremely
dangerous.